Friday, February 7, 2014

I've been waffling back and forth about going public with this since this morning but I think I would hate myself if something happened to a friends little one and I hadn't gotten this out there. So I think it's worth the flak I might take to share my experience if it will save another little one. With Elim we occasionally had him sleep in bed with me after Charles went to work so I could get some more sleep, we followed all the "safe cosleeping guidelines" and nothing ever happened. With Isla she's basically slept in bed beside me exclusively, only spending a few nights away from our bed in her ten and a half weeks. I had researched and found that there were studies that showed if you followed a list of guidelines, you could safely bedshare with your little one. So we followed everything, no heavy blankets, not overly tired, not under the influence of anything, etc. Below is the link to the mother-baby behavioral sleep lab that has outline all of these guidelines.

http://cosleeping.nd.edu/safe-co-sleeping-guidelines/

Until last night we were incident free, everything went perfect. We put Isla in bed and put her snuza hero movement monitor on that we've had since she was first put into the hospital for what ended up being laryngomalacia. Went to bed, and got up and fed her at one and right back to sleep. About five am her monitor started buzzing and alarming that she wasn't moving, which means she wasn't breathing. I had rolled over on her and she couldn't breathe because of that. Thankfully when I moved she took a deep breath and kept on sleeping, waking up about ten minutes later to eat. I got lucky, I could very easily have been planning another funeral today. I'm horrified, I couldn't go back to sleep after that thinking of what easily could have been had her monitor picked up my movement as hers. I didn't feel her, she wasn't struggling she was just laying there sleeping. She won't be sleeping in bed with us again unless we're awake, that's not a risk I can take, I can't bury another baby, especially not one that is being buried because of something I did.

Bedsharing is never safe. You can make it safer by following the guidelines, but it's never truly safe. You can't know what you're going to do as you're sleeping or if you're going to know if you're getting dangerously close to cutting off their airway, or worse actually doing it.

So glad this little girl is safe, she's got angels watching out for her for sure. She'll be sleeping (I hope!) safely in her arms reach cosleeper tonight, in her own area separate from us from now on, until she transitions to her crib in her room.